On the Italo-French reception of the Book of Abramelin and the three-book recension

It is by now widely known that when Watkins published Samuel Mathers’s translation of the Book of Abramelin in 1897, the English-speaking esoteric community became familiarised with a version of the text which was to some degree corrupt and which differed significantly from the form in which it originally circulated in German. The story of this version of the text is nevertheless worth telling, as it is indicative of a rich reception history which is less obviously attested in the German tradition. The three-book recension is originally attested in Italian and its core elements were certainly already present by 1650, not long after the composition in German of the text in its canonical form. It nevertheless represents an abridgement from a much more faithful translation into Italian which did contain all four books. In terra italiana, the text underwent two significant transformations: the first being the abridgement and the introduction of the curious device of the child called upon initially to witness the presence of the Angel, and the second an extensive series of apologetic and Christianizing insertions which clearly suggest a structured process of transmission very akin to that which seems to have characterized the Sworn Book of Honorius. Both of these transformations seem to have taken place in parts of Italy which were under Spanish influence, possibly the Duchy of Milan in the first instance, but almost certainly Naples or southern Italy in the second. It is from this latter form of the text that the French translation attested in the Arsénal derives.